For the next week we as a family are doing some fun Christmas activities. These are many of our yearly Christmas traditions. Each year we go and shop for toys for Christmas is for Kids, a local charity. Throughout the year we save $10 a month to make this shopping trip and I also keep a collection of extra toys from my reviews to add to the donation. This is partly because we do not need that many toys and partly to help the kids learn that we should help those less fortunate. This year I connected with DriveShop to secure a very special car for the week to help in our activities. We’ll be driving a deep dark red Mazda CX-5 AWD from Mazda USA, it is my Santa’s sleigh for the week.

If you’d like to follow along with our adventures then you should check out the hashtag of #DriveMazda and #BenSparkGives. I’ll be talking about even more of our adventures for the week and talking more about the Mazda CX-5. I like the look of this vehicle and it rides really nice. We took it to Target today to buy the toys that we will donate to Christmas is for kids. But before we did that I loaded up all the toys that I had been putting aside all year from my toy reviews.

There is plenty of trunk space for the toys that we are donating. I can fit way more into the trunk is need be and that is the case since we are also going out to spend the money we saved and I hope that we find lots of deals to get a bunch more toys to make more kids happy.

I’ve gotten a ton of toys from Hasbro over the year and including ones at Toy Fair. They make up a huge chunk of the toys that we will donate this coming Wednesday. I’ve certainly kept many toys from our reviews this year but with so many toys I don’t want to make the kids incredibly spoiled with so many toys. I also keep many of the Hasbro toys for myself, especially the Star Wars, Nerf and Transformers ones.

After loading up the toys at home I picked Andrew up from daycare and then picked up Allison and Eva. We zipped over to Chili’s for dinner. The kids had a nice time and they really impressed our waitress with their good manners. Well, Eva showed good manners, Andrew did at first and then went nutty showing off. He’d had a long day. But he still was sweet.

We went to Target for a few reasons. Target is our favorite place to shop. We get 5% off our purchases and they had a good sale happening where many toy brands were buy one get one 50% off. The kids loved having the ability to decide which toys to buy. We try and keep each toy purchase to about $10 a toy. With the buy one get one 50% deal we could end up buying more toys overall. They got a bunch of great toys and made good choices. Then on the way out, we made sure to have the kids and their haul for Christmas is for Kids. They’re going to be even more excited to make the delivery on Wednesday.

We have more Christmas Traditions to enjoy throughout the week. Cove back to learn more.